It's stormy, waves pound with extra punch and it is a day I stand thankful to be inside. Warm, cushioned by a newly done bed, and recovering from sickness last night.

Fall is giving way in the Pacific Northwest, and the cold clenches of November are starting to feel more like December. I'm excited for Christmas this year, and plan to start early. With a little one, and one on the way, the sooner I start, the more likelihood I may accomplish this Christmas spray I envision.

Sewing has been fast and practical as of late. Nursing covers, little p.j. pants, and sometimes, in bleary-eyed trances of not being able to focus because I'm up so much at night, I sew together just random scraps, more to just hear and feel the purr of my machine. It engages something, suturing my sanity together; mending pregnancy brain.

At first I am sick, real sick, but this second little one has been more merciful than the first, and I am finding that after three months of enduring all day sickness, any time I can be up and about is really imbued with a new vigor.

I've been listening about Thomas Jefferson while I go about life's tasks. What is the key I have learned? How fervently he believed in keeping busy as a recipe for happiness. It seems to me so interesting a man whom accomplished so much, and also had so many to serve him, was such a believer in action.

I'm reading his Garden Book, and also the lovely prose-like Ahab's Wife, a story by Sena Jeter Nashlund. I wish I had more time to savor it slowly as I am thoroughly pleased with all her sewing/quilting references so far.

The nesting is pestering me with such a ferocity this time around, that I wonder will it ever cease?, and I try to make peace with a rate of progress that is slower than I would like.

Remembering to rest, don't we all need to be reminded that being busy is important, but there are seasons when rest is so oft forgotten yet so vital.

I have planted daffodils and tulips that will bloom when the baby comes, so I can look out the window of my bedroom and see them grow set against the sea.